Professor Jacobsen has been teaching full-time at Denison since 1984. He received the A.B. in Latin from Frankln and Marshall College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics from The Ohio State University. Professor Jacobsen teaches Latin and Greek, and a wide variety of courses on the history and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. As a scholar interested Roman poetry, specifically in the work and the reception of the poet Ovid, Professor Jacobsen's most recent work includes an essay in the book Ted Hughes and the Classics, published last year by Oxford University Press, and an article on Ovid's influence on the contemporary Irish poet, Ciaran Carson, published in the journal Classical Outlook.

From a critical race and gender studies perspective, my research addresses the practices, performances, and representations of scientific inquiry, technoscience, and public health.

Research Details:

Specifically, my interest is in the discursive production of "public health anxieties" and the ways systems of race, nation, and gender frame "risky bodies" and "at-risk bodies." In analyzing the 2002-03 multi-country outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), I trace a genealogy of SARS scientific progress at primarily cellular and genetic levels which serves as a backdrop for political, regulatory, and popular science discourses. In addition, I am currently interested in "nail salons" as discursively produced sites of "public health anxiety," fear, and contagion.

Broadly, my area of scholarship aims to make connections across terrains of “natures” and “cultures.” Much of the public perceives the biological sciences as wholly residing in the natural world. In other words, the scientific study of the living natural world operates with an objectivity that produces value-free knowledge that is untouched by “culture,” that is without historical, political and economic contexts; scientific knowledge is an unblemished reflection of the natural world. On the hand, there is an analogous and equally troublesome misconception of “women’s studies” as wholly residing in culture, that is operating within a social constructionism that problematically annihilates subjects, objects, and “facts.” While neither of these caricatures does justice to these (inter)disciplines’ intents, they allow us to trace needed connections between feminist critiques and biological inquiries. Feminist science studies aims to examine and embrace dimensions of reality between the social and the material.